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How to Use Community to Grow Your App

There’s always lots discussion around user acquisition, optimizing cost of customer acquisition and finding new channels to leverage for growth. An alternative method to sustainable growth is to leverage what might be your most valuable assets as a business- your exisiting community.

We reached out to a handful of bright minds in the space and asked them:

How do you use community to increase growth, engagement or monetization of your mobile app?

Our team is called Sungy Mobile and we make the Go series of Apps on Android. If you look, video has driven a lot of direct and indirect growth and engagement for us, helping introduce a broad base of new users to the product Go Launcher.

Our team focuses on nurturing a community of video bloggers on Android. Typically, our community team provides them with early access to a preview version of the product or new themes. Once they produce, we will offer assistance and connect them to a product manager to talk about the product features they highlight. In turn, a search on Youtube for “Go Launcher” will yield thousands of videos that drive traffic to our Play store page. If your product supports a strong community of users, they can be your powerful, most profitable source of growth and will result in high engagement if you reward them with early access to products and services.

When working on a social app like my team and I are, engagement is an important metric in the early days. Engagement is an indicator of potential retention, which is arguably the single most important metric for consumer software products. Community is an integral part of engagement because as community grows the users feel more and more invested in the product as a result. Community can look very different between social products and even within social products. For example, LinkedIn provides a platform for connecting with people you know on a professionally, but there are also active groups for specific industry verticals and professional skills. Social products ultimately connect people online (or offline in the case of Meetup) which means community must be the glue that holds everything together.

Apply Nir Eyal’s Hooked Model Canvas to your community to include triggers, rewards, actions, and investments. If you analyze any popular community – LinkedIn, Product Hunt, Pinterest – you’ll note that all of these hooks are in place.

A favorite method of ours is to connect inactive users with those who are active members of the community. This way the active users are the ones who re-engage the inactive ones instead of the company sending a pleading “letter from the CEO”. Think of it as organic growth but for engagement!